Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Traffic Analytics Using Probabilistic Graphical Models Enhanced With Knowledge Bases, Pramod Anantharam, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Graphical models have been successfully used to deal with uncertainty, incompleteness, and dynamism within many domains. These models built from data often ignore preexisting declarative knowledge about the domain in the form of ontologies and Linked Open Data (LOD) that is increasingly available on the web. In this paper, we present an approach to leverage such 'top-down' domain knowledge to enhance 'bottom-up' building of graphical models. Specifically, we propose three operations on the graphical model structure to enrich it with nodes, edges, and edge directions. We illustrate the enrichment process using traffic data from 511.org and declarative knowledge from ConceptNet. …

Integrating Evidence-Based Practices Into Public Relations Education, Karen Freberg, David L. Remund, Kathy Keltner-Previs

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Public relations continue to play an essential and changing role in society, requiring the regular reassessment of the education of future public relations practitioners. Academics and practitioners often differ in how they view the public relations field, how they define the discipline, and how they view the major pedagogical approaches. This paper explores the impact of integrating three different perspectives in public relations education, including practitioner perspective, client perspective, and the evidence-based perspective. Results from students’ reaction papers and an online questionnaire suggest that integrating an evidence-based approach improves the competence and clarity of communications counsel provided by aspiring practitioners.

Advancing Data Reuse In Phyloinformatics Using An Ontology-Driven Semantic Web Approach, Maryam Panahiazar, Amit P. Sheth, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Rutger Vos, Jim Leebens-Mack

Kno.e.sis Publications

Phylogenetic analyses can resolve historical relationships among genes, organisms or higher taxa. Understanding such relationships can elucidate a wide range of biological phenomena, including, for example, the importance of gene and genome duplications in the evolution of gene function, the role of adaptation as a driver of diversification, or the evolutionary consequences of biogeographic shifts. Phyloinformaticists are developing data standards, databases and communication protocols (e.g. Application Programming Interfaces, APIs) to extend the accessibility of gene trees, species trees, and the metadata necessary to interpret these trees, thus enabling researchers across the life sciences to reuse phylogenetic knowledge. Specifically, Semantic Web …

A Hybrid Approach To Finding Relevant Social Media Content For Complex Domain Specific Information Needs, Delroy H. Cameron, Amit P. Sheth, Nishita Jaykumar, Gaurish Anand, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Gary Alan Smith

Kno.e.sis Publications

While contemporary semantic search systems offer to improve classical keyword-based search, they are not always adequate for complex, domain specific information needs. Some complex search situations require knowledge of both ontological concepts as well as 'intelligible constructs' not typically modeled in ontologies. Intelligible constructs convey essential information, which may be important to the holistic information needs of information seekers. Such constructs may include notions of intensity, frequency, interval, dosage, emotion, sentiment, equivalence, synonymy, negation, parts-of-speech, etc. However, few search systems utilize both structured background knowledge (ontologies) and the aforementioned knowledge for query interpretation in domain specific searches. Instead, there is …

Twitris: Socially Influenced Browsing, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Wenbo Wang, Raghava Mutharaju, Pramod Anantharam, Vinh Nguyen, Amit P. Sheth, Karthik Gomadam, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper, we present Twitris, a semantic Web application that facilitates browsing for news and information, using social perceptions as the fulcrum. In doing so we address challenges in large scale crawling, processing of real time information, and preserving spatio-temporal-thematic properties central to observations pertaining to real time events. We extract metadata about events from Twitter and bring related news and Wikipedia articles to the user. In developing Twitris, we have used the DBPedia ontology.

Adaptive Semantic Annotation Of Entity And Concept Mentions In Text, Pablo N. Mendes

Kno.e.sis Publications

The recent years have seen an increase in interest for knowledge repositories that are useful across applications, in contrast to the creation of ad hoc or application-specific databases.
These knowledge repositories figure as a central provider of unambiguous identifiers and semantic relationships between entities. As such, these shared entity descriptions serve as a common vocabulary to exchange and organize information in different formats and for different purposes. Therefore, there has been remarkable interest in systems that are able to automatically tag textual documents with identifiers from shared knowledge repositories so that the content in those documents is described in a …

Using Facebook And Other Snss In K-12 Classrooms: Ethical Considerations For Safe Social Networking, Keith Howard

Education Faculty Articles and Research

The purpose of this article is to examine the potential risks of bringing social networking sites (SNS) into the classroom through the lens of Moor's (1999) just-consequentialist theory. Moor compares the setting of ethical policies in the fast-changing world of technology to a sailor trying to set a course while sailing. His analogy could not be more appropriate for educators' attempts to cope with the question of online social networking in schools. Educators must weigh the potential advantages of using SNSs in educational settings against the risks that such inclusion would entail. If the proper precautions are not taken, student …

Predictors Of The Change In The Expression Of Emotional Support Within An Online Breast Cancer Support Group: A Longitudinal Study, Woohyun Yoo, Ming-Yuan Chih, Min-Woo Kwon, Junghwan Yang, Eunji Cho, Bryan Mclaughlin, Kang Namkoong, Dhavan V. Shah, David H. Gustafson

Community & Leadership Development Faculty Publications

OBJECTIVES: To explore how the expression of emotional support in an online breast cancer support group changes over time, and what factors predict this pattern of change.

METHODS: We conducted growth curve modeling with data collected from 192 participants in an online breast cancer support group within the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) during a 24-week intervention period.

RESULTS: Individual expression of emotional support tends to increase over time for the first 12 weeks of the intervention, but then decrease slightly with time after that. In addition, we found that age, living situation, comfort level with computer and the …

There Is No Word For Work In The Dragon Tongue, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly

English Faculty Publications

The past decade or so has witnessed a relatively steady stream of scholarly interest in the mundane medieval—in labor, local economies, and their influence upon wider cultural production.¹ Despite this interest (and perhaps as a reaction to it), popular medievalism has continued to emphasize versions of the medieval that are decidedly more heroic—productions that are simultaneously (and paradoxically) more “realistic” and more “fantastic.” Labor plays, at best, a supporting role in these fantasies: while not absent, it rarely, if ever, has the same productive presence as it does in recent scholarly treatments of medieval economies. Inasmuch as popular medievalism …

Is There A Role For Common Carriage In An Internet-Based World?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

During the course of the network neutrality debate, advocates have proposed extending common carriage regulation to broadband Internet access services. Others have endorsed extending common carriage to a wide range of other Internet-based services, including search engines, cloud computing, Apple devices, online maps, and social networks. All too often, however, those who focus exclusively on the Internet era pay too little attention to the lessons of the legacy of regulated industries, which has long struggled to develop a coherent rationale for determining which industries should be subject to common carriage. Of the four rationales for determining the scope of common …

Hypergraph Index: An Index For Context-Aware Nearest Neighbor Query On Social Networks, Yazhe Wang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social network has been touted as the No. 2 innovation in a recent IEEE Spectrum Special Report on “Top 11 Technologies of the Decade”, and it has cemented its status as a bona fide Internet phenomenon. With more and more people starting using social networks to share ideas, activities, events, and interests with other members within the network, social networks contain a huge amount of content. However, it might not be easy to navigate social networks to find specific information. In this paper, we define a new type of queries, namely context-aware nearest neighbor (CANN) search over social network to …

Media, Mormonism, And Mormon Media Studies, Sherry Baker

Faculty Publications

Bosco Bae has asked me to write a reflection about the Mormon Media Studies Symposia that were held at Brigham Young University in 2010 and 2012, and to provide some "general thoughts" about the relationship between media, Mormonism, and Mormons. I also will address the topic of Mormon Media Studies as an emerging discipline, and will conclude with some thoughts about Mormons, the media, and the Mormon Moment. My comments are meant only to be conversational in tone. They certainly do not purport to be definitive or comprehensive statements about the topics discussed.

Top 10 Law School Home Pages Of 2012, Roger V. Skalbeck, Matthew L. Zimmerman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For a fourth consecutive year, every website home page of every ABA-accredited law school is evaluated and ranked based on objective criteria. The goal is to identify well-executed sites adopting best practices. For the 2012 report, twenty-six elements are evaluated across these three categories: Design Patterns and Metadata, Accessibility and Validation, & Marketing and Communications. For 2012, there are four new elements, two prior elements have been combined, and one element was dropped.

For 2012, forty-six schools now use the HTML5 doctype, which is up from thirteen in 2011 and just one in 2010. Eighteen schools achieve perfect scores in …

The Impact Of Smartphone Adoption On Consumers’ Switching Behavior In Broadband And Cable Tv Services, Gwangjae Jung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The emergence of smartphones has brought a technology disruption to the telecom business. Due to the various services offered in association with smartphones, people can surf the web or watch TV. This research is related to telecom services overall, and has the goal of finding the impact of smartphone adoption to consumers’ switching behavior in broadband and cable TV services. This research adopts a quasi-experimental design and investigates the causal effect of smartphone service adoption on broadband and cable TV service choices. The data collection involves five years of consumer service subscriptions in a Singaporean telecommunications company. I tested for …

Print To Pixel: How Can The Cultural Implications Of Mediated Images And Text Be Examined Using Creative Practice?, Patricia Adele Thomas

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Information in the twenty-first century is at our fingertips in an instant. Through the technology of the mobile phone, computer, and television, we are alerted to information of international, national, local, and personal significance. The aim of this research is to establish that creative practice can provide a cogent forum with which to interrogate the cultural implications of mediated images and text in the twenty first Century. This exegesis Print to pixel explores the interrelationship between the political and cultural values as identified in the various codes within western mainstream news media. The cultural implications of the shift from print …

Engagingness And Responsiveness Behavior Models On The Enron Email Network And Its Application To Email Reply Order Prediction, Byung-Won On, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang, Loo Nin Teow

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In email networks, user behaviors affect the way emails are sent and replied. While knowing these user behaviors can help to create more intelligent email services, there has not been much research into mining these behaviors. In this paper, we investigate user engagingness and responsiveness as two interaction behaviors that give us useful insights into how users email one another. Engaging users are those who can effectively solicit responses from other users. Responsive users are those who are willing to respond to other users. By modeling such behaviors, we are able to mine them and to identify engaging or responsive …

Opening The Dissertation: Overcoming Cultural Calcification And Agoraphobia, Denise Troll Covey

Denise Troll Covey

This article places the struggle to open access to the dissertation in the context of the crisis in doctoral education and the transition from print to digital literacy. It explores the underlying cultural calcification and agoraphobia that deter engagement with openness. Solving the problems will require overhauling the curriculum and conventions of doctoral education. Opening access to dissertations is an important first step, but insufficient to end the crisis. Only opening other dimensions of the dissertation -- the structure, media, notion of authorship, and methods of assessment -- can foster the digital literacy needed to save PhD programs from extinction. …

The End Of The Art Connoisseur? Experts And Knowledge Production In The Visual Arts In The Digital Age, Payal Arora, Filip Vermeylen

Payal Arora

In this digital age, declarations surface of the death of the expert and the democratization of information. Crowd wisdom is seen as the new guide in constructing and evaluating knowledge. In the context of the art world, this tension between the amateurs and the experts becomes particularly pronounced as popular meets high culture. Questions arise such as: what is the role of the expert in the evaluation of art in contemporary times? Do social media dismantle age-old hierarchies and established priesthoods in the art world? And can we assume that mass participation in valuation results in better judgments? This article …

Reading Religion In Internet Memes, Ruth Tsuria, Wendi Bellar, Heidi A. Campbell, Aya Yadlin-Segal, Kyong James Cho, Andrea Terry

Ruth Tsuria

No abstract provided.

Observatory Of Trends In Software Related Microblogs, Achananuparp Palakorn, Nelman Lubis Ibrahim, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

David LO

Microblogging has recently become a popular means to disseminate information among millions of people. Interestingly, software developers also use microblog to communicate with one another. Different from traditional media, microblog users tend to focus on recency and informality of content. Many tweet contents are relatively more personal and Opinionated, compared to that of traditional news report. Thus, by analyzing microblogs, one could get the up-to-date information about what people are interested in or feel toward a particular topic. In this paper, we describe our microblog observatory that aggregates more than 70,000 Twitter feeds, captures software-related tweets, and computes trends from …